Steven Spielberg took a crack at War of the Worlds and does
a good job with some fairly poor material. The film is a kind of victim’s view
of the alien invasion with a forty year old teenager, played by Tom Cruise, and
his two children played by Justin Chatwin and Dakota Fanning, flee the alien
fighting machines, now tripods right out of the original book. We see very
little of the actual fighting. A peek at some soldiers desperately trying to
hold a ridge line, an over flight of stealth fighters, and the horizon glowing
from some distance horror. There are wonderful, frightening set pieces,
including the appearance of tripod fighting machines, sounding something that
sounds like the trump of doom, as they advance on a horde of refugees fleeting
onto a ferry to try to get away. Tim Robbins does a good turn as a demented
survivalist. Gene Barry and Ann Robinson have cameos toward the end.
The movie falls down a little bit when one examines the
strategy of the aliens. Apparently they buried the fighting machines
underground millions of years ago. Then, the machines having gone undetected by
the technological civilization that had grown up, their crews are beamed down
by lighting bolts and then the machines emerge from the ground to kill and
destroy. It is scheme worthy of another Spielberg project, Pinky and the Brain.
Still, Spielberg’s take has its moments. Most fascinating is
how Tom Cruise’s character gains twenty years of maturity in about two days as
he seeks to preserve his life and those of his children, not only from the
aliens, but from demented humans, like Robbins’ survivalist character.
The movie ends, as did the book and the previous movie, but
with the added bang of a soldier bringing down a fighting machine, now bereft
of its force shield, with a hand held anti tank weapon. Of course, despite the almost end of the world, nobody is in church or is praying to God, as it was in the first movie. Evolution caused the death of the aliens.